A New Compact and High Gain Circularly-Polarized Slot Antenna Array for Ku-Band Mobile Satellite TV Reception

A compact and high-gain SIW-fed circularly polarized (CP) slot-antenna array with a stacked feed structure is presented for the application of Ku-band high-data-rate satellite communications. First, a novel probe-fed SIW cavity with four slots etched on the top surface is proposed as a high-gain radiating element for the array. The four slots in the cavity act as a 2 x 2 array, and its directivity is 2.15 and 1.43 dB greater than that of the cavity-backed antenna of the same size using ring slot and split ring slot, respectively. Second, a compact 1-4 SIW power divider is designed for exciting a subarray. Third, the 2 x 2 subarray is further expanded to an 8 x 16 array by adopting an additional layer of 1-32 SIW feeding network to meet the gain requirement of the Ku-band mobile satellite TV reception. Finally, experiments are carried out to verify the designed prototypes. Measured results show that proposed 128-element array has a relative impedance bandwidth of 4.8% (11.84 to 12.42 GHz), AR bandwidth of 130 MHz (12.01 to 12.14 GHz), and a peak gain of 26.8 dBic at 12.06 GHz. Owing to the simple feeding networks and the compact radiating element, the antenna has a compact size of 6.04
_λ0
x 11.96
_λ0
x 0.1
_λ0
. Experimental results show that the proposed CP antenna array is suitable for applications of Ku-band mobile satellite TV reception.